Ramblings

Some weeks, it may seem like this blog is more about bugs than about plants. Isn’t gardening all about the plants? Well, it probably should be, but our gardens exist in the natural world, which is crowded with many kinds of life, including insects. Some of the insects are helper-insects, like pollinators and predators (“beneficials”). Other insects are destructive, eating our plants or spreading diseases across our landscapes (“pests”).

Some insects can be helpers as adults and pests in their larval stage. A lot of butterflies and moths are in this category. As adults, they pollinate flowers, helping plants to make fruits and seeds. As caterpillars (larval stage), they eat our plants. This dual life complicates a gardener’s decisions about how to manage caterpillars in the garden.

Which insects are “good” and which are “bad”? How can we know what to do when baby insects, like caterpillars, eat plants in our gardens?

Skipper butterfly on a late-summer zinnia. PHOTO/Amygwh

For me, the decision often comes down to whether the insect specializes on one kind of plant, especially if I am not planning to eat that plant. A lot of the skipper butterfly larvae eat turfgrass. Bermudagrass is not my most favorite plant, so I am not troubled when caterpillars are munching on the lawn.

However, the decision about how to manage pest insects in the garden could one-day disappear. You may remember the report last year of a study in Germany that showed a 75% loss of flying insects within the past few decades.

The authors of the study note:

The widespread insect biomass decline is alarming, ever more so as all traps were placed in protected areas that are meant to preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity. While the gradual decline of rare insect species has been known for quite some time (e.g. specialized butterflies [9, 66]), our results illustrate an ongoing and rapid decline in total amount of airborne insects active in space and time.

A recent article in the Washington Post, “‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss,” tells about another long-term study in Puerto Rico that shows the same trend. We are losing insects of all kinds, and in great numbers. Why should we care? The article offers a reason:

Thirty-five percent of the world’s plant crops require pollination by bees, wasps and other animals. And arthropods are more than just pollinators. They’re the planet’s wee custodians, toiling away in unnoticed or avoided corners. They chew up rotting wood and eat carrion.

To some gardeners, no longer having to worry about pest insects may sound like a dream come true. Sadly, the good and the bad go together. If we lose our pests, we also lose our helpers. This means we also lose a lot of good food and our “wee custodians”.

Like melons? They are pollinated by insects.

It may be possible for us to live on wind-pollinated crops, like wheat, corn, and beets, and on self-pollinated crops, like most of the beans. I don’t think we’d like that diet, though. In addition, being surrounded by rotting carcasses would make the situation extra-unpleasant.

While I don’t expect total losses of insects any time soon (or even in my lifetime), the thought of such a catastrophic loss of beauty and helpfulness is sobering.

What can we do to change the situation? Well, any action that supports insect life could help slow the decline. Try this:

plant more wildflowers to support native pollinators,

allow more diverse plantings in our yards, to provide more places to live for more kinds of insects, and

refrain (as much as we can) from using pesticide products in ways that kill multiple kinds of insects instead of just the one pest that is “bugging” us.

One new favorite food that I found while in Italy uses stale bread as its base. The dish is called panzanella locally, but in English the name is bread salad. I know — the name “bread salad” isn’t inspiring. The appearance isn’t, either. However, the flavor explains why so many people keep basil plants growing in pots on their windowsills and doorsteps. Bread salad taught me that stale bread plus tomatoes and basil equals great food.

Doorstep gardens in Tuscany, like this one, often include a pot of basil. PHOTO/Amygwh

After being served bread salad a few times here, I asked one of my new Italian friends how to make it. This is what I was told:

Traditional panzanella, or bread salad, recipe

Start with stale bread (3-4 days old) that is dry and hard.

Break up the bread, then drop the pieces into water for brief saturation. Then, squeeze out the excess water as much as possible.

Mix onion, white vinegar, and a LOT of chopped basil into the bread in small amounts. Keeping adding and mixing until the flavor is good. Then, add olive oil.

Chop tomatoes, drain them, add salt, and continue to drain them until they are fairly dry.

If cucumbers are available, chop them to add to the salad, but do not use the gel/seed part.

Tips to make the generalized recipe work

The standard, soft, sandwich-style bread that is prevalent in the U.S. might not work well in bread salad. I think that the bread needs to be the kind made of just 4 ingredients – flour, water, yeast, and salt. Whole wheat works, but so does bread made from white flour. Joe and I have made the salad with both kinds, with good results.

We don’t have a basil plant on our windowsill in Italy, but our friend makes herb-infused olive oils. She gave us a bottle of basil-infused olive oil to use instead of fresh basil, and it is glorious!

Notice that there are no guidelines for amounts of anything. Either Joe and I have been very lucky, since this is good every time we make it, or bread salad is nearly foolproof.

Less obvious (maybe) benefits of bread salad

It uses an ingredient — old, hard bread — that might otherwise be wasted. As a person who prefers to use up leftovers, even hard, stale, leftovers, rather than waste them, finding recipes for good food that use old bread well is a gift. Another way we have noticed that hard, stale bread is used is as a thickener for soups. Tomato soup, bean soup, vegetable soup — all contain bread that has been soaked, broken up, and dispersed throughout the broth.

When tomatoes are in season and piling into the kitchen in large numbers, having an easy recipe (like this one) that uses them well is helpful. Ditto for cucumbers.

If your basil is growing into an enormous plant, you can use that, too.

Let me know if you try making bread salad at home, and if you love it, too!

Many of us would like to do more to support our pollinator insects like bees and butterflies. They are important to all of us who like to eat delicious and varied meals! One action step often suggested to support our insect friends is that we plant more pollinator gardens. However, we don’t all have a lot of sunny areas to turn into flower beds for the bees, butterflies, and other helper-insects. The good news is that even small yards can support pollinators – a lot of them.

How is this possible? One very easy way is to include flowers in your lawn.

Clover, dandelions, and other lawn flowers support pollinators

An increasing number of studies show that lawns that contain flowering “weeds” are important resources for pollinators. If we think about it just a little, these results make sense.

Flowers of plants like dandelion, clover, wood sorrel, and violets are sources of nectar and pollen, which are food for the pollinators. When a lawn has all one kind of plant, like fescue or Bermudagrass, there is less food to support many of these insects.

Some neighborhoods have only small patches of lawn. The studies suggest that even these small yards can support pollinators by allowing flowers like clover and dandelion to bloom.

This works for farms, too

Joe and I used to volunteer at a small garden/farm in our county. We mostly worked in “weed management”, with hoes, but we still had fun. The garden included a couple of large fields that were tilled, planted, and fertilized by tractor. It also had some very large raised beds for growing additional vegetables. The garden produced an astonishing abundance of food.

The only flowers that we planted on purpose were sunflowers. The upper field had a row of sunflowers along one edge every year.

A visiting friend asked me once, “where are the pollinator beds?” This was a serious question, and the answer was only obvious if you knew where to look.

I had been working there for a few years, so I already knew the secret.

Patches of lawn separated and surrounded all the crop-areas, and flowers of weeds like dandelion and clover sparked the green expanses like stars. Plants that supported pollinators were all around us!

Bees and other pollinators could be seen visiting all of those flowers. In addition, beehives on the property produced enough honey that it was obvious the bees were finding plenty of nectar.

Work less and be a trend setter

You can support pollinators with less work by allowing volunteer flowers to grow in your lawn. A separate bed of herbs and flowers that support pollinators is nice, too, but it is not the only way to go.

The main difficulty in allowing dandelions to brighten your lawn may be to your sense of social acceptability. In many suburban neighborhoods, these bee-friendly flowers are not allowed! However, the current ideal of an all-turfgrass lawn is just a fashion — like a beehive hairdo or bell-bottom jeans. We can allow it to pass from its current state of desirability to one of “well, that’s what we did in those days”.

My own flower-filled lawn might not be enough to start a new trend, but I have seen some wonderful landscapes that are underlain by mixed-plant lawns.

Examples of flower-filled lawns

This is my second summer to be in Italy for Joe’s work (an interim position, so next year we will not be here). One of my great joys has been seeing clover-filled lawns around historic buildings. The beautiful church, San Biagio, just outside Montepulciano, sits in a flower-filled lawn.

It is great to walk up to the church and see bees and bee-mimics (flower-flies) zooming through the clover!

More convincing for others, though, may be the formal La Foce estate gardens in the Val d’Orcha, in Southern Tuscany. The lines of cypress trees, clipped boxwood hedges, fountains, and grand staircases are set on a lawn (clipped very short) that includes clover and other flowers.

It is possible that I am the only person to visit this amazing landscape who turned her camera to photograph the ground. However, I loved seeing the clover and admired the practicality of not-messing-with the lawn. The role of the lawn seemed to be as a backdrop to show off the geometric shapes of the boxwoods, the tall cypress, and what we call “the hardscape.” It worked, too, even with clover.

Associating flowering lawns with beautiful landscapes might help turn the tide in favor of clover, dandelions, and other lawn flowers. Then, owners of even small yards will be proud to support pollinators from edge-to-edge.

The flowers pictured above were on a peach tree at the community garden on the grounds of a church in Marietta. I took the picture a couple of weeks ago, at the very end of February.

On warm-enough days, I sometimes take my lunch to eat at a picnic table by that garden. It isn’t too far from the office, and it is a beautiful place.

These flowers are beautiful, too, but I was not as happy to see them as I might have been in another spring.

The problem is that the flowers opened too soon, triggered, I would guess, by a February that felt a lot like April. Unfortunately, we are about to have two nights in a row of temperatures around 25 degrees F.

Even though bees and other tiny insects buzzed all around the open flowers, working their pollinator magic, the little fruits forming as a result of that work are at a high risk of damage from the impending cold. Apple and plum trees in my neighborhood have done the same thing, blooming too soon.

This is one of those times when I think of the poet Countee Cullen, and his poem that starts “I cannot hold my peace, John Keats; There never was a spring like this.” Of course, he meant it differently, but this definitely is a spring that I have not seen before.

Do you remember when you first figured out that some plants look great for only part of the year before looking as though they had died, but then they popped back up the very next year looking like nothing unusual had happened?

When I see daffodils, which do exactly that magic act, I remember talking (maybe 15 years ago) with a young guy about his new home and its great yard. He was very concerned that he had already killed some of his beautiful flowers.

We eventually figured out that his flowers were daffodils. The guy just had not yet learned that some flowers (like daffodils) come up early, bloom for a couple of weeks, and then begin to die back for the year. At that time in the season, the yellowing, collapsed leaves were normal.

It was a moment of revelation! I do not remember the exact moment when I learned about the hibernation stage of bulbs and the plants known as “herbaceous perennials”, but I certainly remember when that guy learned. We talked some more about the strange ways of plants, and he was relieved to know that he had not killed his beautiful flowers.

Plenty of other flowers follow a similar life pattern. All of the spring bulbs (tulip, hyacinth, crocus, for example), Bee Balm, Anise Hyssop, Phlox, Bleeding Hearts, Trout Lily, Blood Root, and many more beautiful flowering plants do the same disappearing act for at least part of the year.

However, not many of our commonly grown food plants are herbaceous perennials, disappearing for awhile before returning. Asparagus is one. Horseradish is another.

Fennel does that same magic act, too. A few weeks ago, all you could see of my fennel plants was some bare, brown sticks poking out of the ground. Right now, in the garden, the fennel is starting to show some dense feathery growth around the base of those sticks. They are reborn! Magic.

The answer to “when can I start seeds for my spring garden” depends a lot on how much of a gambler you are. If you have seeds, seed-starting materials, and space with lighting galore, then anytime is probably a good time.

If, like me, you have limited space, lighting, and materials, following a more conservative schedule may be a better choice.

For spring veggies and early flowers, my first planting usually begins in mid-to late February. That is when I plant seeds for English peas (and sugar-snaps), spinach, dill, and early flowers like larkspur outdoors in the garden. That is also usually when I set some seed potatoes in a single layer in a lighted space indoors (sunny window can work) so they begin to sprout for mid-March planting.

The problem with planting earlier is that some seeds, peas especially, will rot in the ground if they are too cold and damp for too long. When they do come up, though, they can survive some very cold weather. So can little spinach seedlings. The dill and larkspur won’t come up until later, but they do better when planted early outdoors. That is just their way.

Seeds for other spring crops may come up in a stretch of warmish weather if planted outside very early, but if we get a return to actual winter, with temperatures dropping below 20 degrees F for more than a couple of hours, the little seedlings are not likely to survive. Spinach seedlings can take the cold, and it is possible that kale and collards can, too, but lettuces are less happy with such very cold nights, and new carrot seedlings might not make it, either.

Since the weather can still turn very cold in February, I keep an eye on the forecasts before planting even the most cold-hardy of veggies outside.

For most of my spring veggies, I wait until the first of March to start seeds indoors. That list usually includes lettuces, parsley, and beets. When these little plants are big enough, I move them outside for a few hours each day to help them adjust to life out-of-doors before transplanting them into the garden. By the end of March, they should be ready for that move.

Seeds for peppers often are slow to come up, and I tend to start some peppers, for summer, in the first or second week of March, too. Carrots can be planted outside at around the same time.

Tomatoes are a lot speedier to develop than peppers, so I tend to wait an extra week or two before starting any of those.

(Photo at top is of basil seedlings, started as seeds at the end of March, 2016, for sharing in May with other gardeners. Photo by Amygwh.)

Ads on this Site

This site includes some affiliate ad links to products (through Amazon Affiliates, for example), which, if anyone buys them, could provide a little income to support the continuance of Small Garden News. Not all links are for affiliate ads, though; some links just go to other good resources.